Prick up your ears

It's the cans wot did it. Former Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who publicly disclosed his hearing loss in 1989, has denied that the band's famously ear-shredding gigs - once listed in the Guinness Book of Records at 130 decibels, equivalent to a pneumatic drill nearby or, bizarrely, a noisy squeeze toy heard close up - are responsible for his encroaching deafness. On the contrary: it's the studio that's to blame. Headphones, more specifically.

While the music press offers the story fairly straight up, today's Times, which deems it worthy of a full page 5, turns it into an anthem for doomed youth. iPod users - ageing rockers aren't mentioned - should beware, lest overuse of headphones decimate their hearing. One in 10 British adults, the paper reports, suffers from tinnitus, though it doesn't go into details of why that might be. Too many squeezy toys, perhaps.

Writing on his website, Townshend mourns: "My intuition tells me there is terrible trouble ahead. The downside [to downloading] … may be that we use earphones at almost every stage of interaction with sound." Being plugged in to our iPods for hours on end may not only stunt our appreciation of the world around us, it may blunt our hearing. (Though, judging by the rather ooh-la-la novella (PDF) also published online, Townshend suggests some surprisingly appealing uses for mixing desks and faders.)

Two things strike me as curious about this tale; one mundane, the other less so. First: has Pete Townshend ever actually listened to an iPod? It's as much as I can do to crank out a half-hearted wedge of volume from mine, never mind anything that offers much in the way of threat to my auditory equipment.

iPods in the UK are limited to a decidedly undangerous 104 dB (pesky EU meddling), and with certain earphones, plus distortion, you'll most likely be exposed to even less than that. And of course the world of "buzzes, shrieks and poor connections" cited by Townshend is hardly a feature of most people's digital experience. iPods offer many things, sure, but howling feedback or loose wires there ain't.

But that's by the by. The larger issue is this: the implication is that downloading, and the listening culture it promotes, insulates us from "real" music and hooks us to having it poured straight into our ear canals. Surely one of the biggest lessons from 2005 was that downloading, on the contrary, does the opposite: opens out a world in which music is shared more sociably.

You don't have to be an Arctic Monkeys hanger-on to appreciate that digital music has precisely the opposite effect to the one described by arch-moaner Jean Baudrillard, who famously grumped that "nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his Walkman" (and this in 1986, mind). Sharing music, surely, pushes people into places where they can deafen themselves the good, old-fashioned way - in the company of others. Hear, hear.